Sad news for those who purchased ARMA 3 due to the experimental Linux (and Mac) version, as Bohemia Interactive have announced a halt to the updates for it.

As a reminder, Bohemia Interactive teamed up with Virtual Programming (who ported The Witcher 2 and more to Linux) to release a Linux version of ARMA 3 back in 2015. Bohemia put up this page, which highlighted various caveats with the Linux version along with it being labelled as "experimental". They were at least very clear, that the ports might not always be updated and so this isn't entirely unexpected. Since then, it's had a number of updates which usually lagged behind the Windows version quite a lot.

Today, they put out an update post which contains information on what's going on with the ports. It mentions how the ports take a lot of time for preparation and testing, the "port updates are simply quite expensive" and how "work can only begin after the official Windows version of Arma 3 has been successfully deployed to the public".

While it's sad to hear, this situation might not be forever. They noted, that once things calm down in regards to ARMA 3 updates that it's something they "might consider again in the future".

It's obviously a reminder, that when you pick up a game for any platform that isn't finished or is experimental in some way, that purchasing it might not be the best idea unless you're prepared for something like this to happen.

jasonmAs rea987 mentions, Battleye runs natively on Linux and Arma 3 runs via eON. Bohemia could do the same type of port if they wanted using Proton or Wine so as long as Proton or Wine runs Arma 3 well which I'm not sure as I haven't looked. It would just take some collaboration with the folks at Battleye I'd imagine.

eON does not use the source code, only a Windows binary. There's no way to get the Linux version compiled in there. Since BattlEye should catch any kind of tampering, I'm wondering how VP managed this.

Here, "Linux Bin" depots of Arma 3 from public and development branches:

Truly sad that such a realistic and bug-free military simulation will not receive updates. But it's no matter, since the game runs perfectly anyways.

It does not, for example, suffer from performance degradation to the point of running at 15 FPS after you respawn a couple of times. Nor does it ever crash for totally abstract reasons, allowing us to write haikus in the crash reporter. The game also sparingly uses GPU memory resources in a way that it never even gets close to 8 GB of VRAM usage. The AI is also super fair, only occasionally managing to shoot you right in the face with an AK from 2000 meters away in the middle of a night in a combination of a sandstorm and a regular storm.

EhviseON does not use the source code, only a Windows binary. There's no way to get the Linux version compiled in there. Since BattlEye should catch any kind of tampering, I'm wondering how VP managed this.

Here, "Linux Bin" depots of Arma 3 from public and development branches:

To be fair, they declared since day one this was purely experimental and they'd only go through with official port if they saw the numbers and it was worthwhile. It sucks for anybody who bought the game, but you can't really be mad at Bohemia and VP, considering they openly said - this has a high probability of going nowhere, purchase at your own risk.

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